The man who masterminded the Great Train Robbery;

Born: September 7, 1931; Died: February 28, 2013.

Bruce Reynolds, who has died aged 81, was the man who organised the Great Train Robbery, one of the most famous – and certainly one of the most audacious – crimes in British history. For a few years after the heist in 1963, he lived the life of a millionaire, but when the money ran out, the police caught up with him and he spent a miserable decade in prison. The notoriety never went away though: in his old age, he wrote his memoirs and toured the country talking about a crime that never lost its grip on the British collective consciousness.

Unlike some of his comrades, Reynolds, who was born in London, was not from a criminal family. His father worked in a car plant in Dagenham and his mother was a nurse and for a while the young Reynolds looked like he might become a journalist. After leaving school at 14, he went to the Daily Mail offices and told them he wanted to be a foreign correspondent. They made him a messenger boy instead and he stayed for two and a half years.

For a while after leaving the Mail, he nurtured some hopes of becoming a professional cyclist before taking a job with the cycle manufacturer Claud Butler. It was here that one of his colleagues introduced him to petty crime and he was imprisoned for the first time when he was 17, for house-breaking.

Over the years, his crimes became more ambitious and the prison sentences longer and by the 1960s he was looking for the big one. Together with 14 other conspirators, he began to plan the train robbery in 1963, by which time he was 31.

It took three months to find a target and get the details right. They settled on the Royal Mail train from Glasgow to London carrying parcels, letters and a huge amount of money and in the early hours of August 8, they struck.

The chain of events that followed is well known, not least thanks to the films and television dramatisations of the robbery. After the gang tampered with track singals, the train was stopped in Buckinghamshire and the gang stormed on board and made off with £2.6m, which in today's money would be around £40million. The train driver Jack Mills was hit over the head and exactly who was responsible and whether it contributed to his death seven years later was never satisfactorily resolved.

In the months that followed, most of the gang were caught and as the noose tightened, Reynolds made his escape to Mexico on a false passport with his wife Frannie and young son Nick. Reynolds said that even though their plan had worked, he felt flat about the whole enterprise. "I felt empty," he said. "Even the sight of £2,600,000 didn't relieve me of this sense of anti-climax."

Eventually, his share of the loot ran out and he was forced to creep back into Britain to replenish his funds through other criminal enterprises. He hid out, under an assumed name, in a house in Torquay but by this point the police were on to him. When they arrived and surrounded his house in November 1968, Reynolds was in bed. "C'est la vie," he said.

He was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a judge determined to stamp on the notoriety and fame the train robbers were attracting. Perhaps the most famous of them, Ronnie Biggs, was still on the run and would remain so for 36 years, and Mr Justice Edmund Davies said: "Let us clear our of the way any romantic notions of daredevilery." He didn't quite succeed and later movies about the robbery – including Buster starring Phil Collins – certainly contributed to those notions.

In the end, Reynolds served 10 of the 25 years, which killed off his marriage. "During this period, I considered suicide," he once said, "but since the real love of my life was my son, who was six years old when I went into prison, I couldn't leave him with that legacy."

On his release in 1978, there was nothing for Reynolds to do but return to his criminal life and in the mid-1980s he was jailed again for handling amphetamines. In the years that followed, he would make personal appearances and give after-dinner speeches and his memoirs, Autobiography of A Thief, appeared in 1995. In recent months, he had been in ill health and was being cared for by his son, a musician, who survives him. His wife Frannie predeceased him.